Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

“Marion, your father was deeply wounded by something, God knows what. His parents died when he was a child. We never talked about things like that. But here, working alongside Sister Mary Joseph Praise, all of us working together, he was sheltered. He was as happy as such a man can be. I felt protective of him. He knew surgery well, but he had no understanding of life.”

“You mean he was like Shiva?”

He paused to consider this. “No. Very different. Shiva's content! Look at him. Shiva has no need for friendship or social support or approval—Shiva lives in this moment. Thomas Stone wasn't like that; he had all the needs the rest of us have. But he was scared. He denied himself his needs, and he denied himself his past.”

“Scared of what?” I found all this hard to swallow. “Matron told me once that he threw instruments when he got upset. She said he had a temper, that he was fearless.”

“Oh, fearless in surgery, I suppose. But even that might not be true. A good surgeon must be fearful and he was a good surgeon, the best, never foolhardy, and appropriately fearful. Well … a few lapses of judgment, but then he was human. But when it came to relationships he was … terrified. He was frightened that if he got close to anyone they'd hurt him. Or perhaps he'd hurt them.”

I was resisting this construction of Stone that was so different from what I'd made up all these years. Finally, I asked, “What do you want from me?”

“Now that my time is coming, Marion … I want to let Thomas Stone know that whatever happened I always considered myself his friend.”

“Why don't you write to him?”

“I can't. I never could. Hema hasn't forgiven him for leaving. She was happy he left—she wanted you two from the moment you were born. But still, she wouldn't forgive him for leaving. And then, once he left, she was terrified—always—that he might come back and claim you. I had to promise her, swear to her, that I wouldn't write him or communicate with him in any form.” He looked at me, and said with quiet pride, “I kept my word, Marion.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

I'd harbored such curiosity about Thomas Stone when I was younger. I had fantasized about his return. Now I resisted Ghosh, and I wasn't quite sure why.

Ghosh went on, “But I fully expected Stone to contact me. I was disappointed as the years went on that he didn't. Marion, he is filled with shame and he assumes that I have no desire to see him. That I hate him.”

“How do you know?”

“I've no way of knowing this for sure. I suspect that to this day he sees himself as an albatross. Call it clinical intuition if you like. The truth is that you were better off with us than with him. Try as he might, I don't know that he could have created what we have here, a family. So I don't want you to hate that man. The cross he carries is huge.”

“Why tell me this now?” I said. “I stopped thinking about him after you came out from jail. He was never there when we needed him. Why should I waste my time thinking about him?”

“For my sake. I told you, this is for me. My one regret. It's not about you. But only you can help me.”

I said nothing.

“Let me see if I can explain …” He looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds. “Marion, there'll be something incomplete about my life if I don't let him know that I still consider him a brother.” His eyes became wet. “And that whatever his reasons are for being silent all these years, I still … love him. I can't see him, I can't tell him this. But you can. I won't live to see it, but that's what I want. Do it without hurting Hema's feelings. Do it for me. Complete what is incomplete.”

“Are you going to tell Shiva this?”

“If I tell Shiva that it's my dying wish, he'd do it. But Shiva may not know how to do it, how to … heal him. It requires more than delivering a message.” He hesitated. “Speaking of Shiva: what I also need to tell you about Shiva is that whatever he did to you, please forgive him.”

He stunned me there. Had he planned to say that? Was it an afterthought? I didn't think Ghosh knew the depths of my hurt, my bitterness toward Shiva, but I'd underestimated him. Still, what happened between me and Shiva wasn't a subject I wanted to bring up with Ghosh; it was too painful, too personal.

“I'll do my best about Thomas Stone. For you. But I can't believe this is what you want. You're forgetting this is the man who caused my mother's death … A nun's death. A nun he got pregnant. And then he abandoned his children. And to this day no one seems to know how any of it happened.”

As my voice rose and quavered, Ghosh said nothing, but looked at me steadily till my shoulders collapsed and I gave in. Id do what he asked.

WHEN THE END CAME a week later he was still in that chair, all of us with him, me and Shiva holding his left hand, Matron holding his right. Almaz, who had become so lean from rigorous fasting, squatted behind his chair with her hand on his shoulder; Hema sat on the arm of the chair, so Ghosh's head could rest against her body. Genet was not to be found. She wasn't in her hostel when Gebrew was sent in a cab to bring her to Missing. Gebrew stood next to Almaz, praying.

Ghosh's breathing was labored, but Hema gave him morphine—he'd taught her that, she said. Morphine “disconnects the head from the brain,” so although the breathlessness was unchanging, the anxiety would be gone.

He opened his eyes once, startled. He looked at Hema, then at us. He smiled and closed his eyes. I like to think in that last gaze he saw a tableau of his family, his real flesh and blood, because our blood was now in his veins. I like to think in seeing us he felt his highest purpose was served.

And that is how he passed from this life to the next, without fanfare, with characteristic simplicity, fearless, opening his eyes that last time to make sure we were fine before he went on.

When his chest stopped moving, my sorrow was mixed with relief: I'd been matching every breath of his with mine for days. I know Hema felt the same way as she laid her head on his and wept, her arms still cradling him.

WITH GHOSH'S DEATH came a new understanding of the word “loss.” I'd lost my birth mother and father, lost the General, lost Zemui, lost Rosina. But I only knew real loss when I lost Ghosh. The hand that patted me and put me to sleep, the lips that trumpeted bedtime songs, the fingers that guided mine to percuss a chest, to feel an enlarged liver or spleen, the heart that coaxed my ears to understand the hearts of others, was now stilled.

At the moment he died I felt the mantle of responsibility pass from him to me. He'd anticipated that. I remembered his advice to wear that mantle lightly. He'd handed me the professional baton, wanted me to be the kind of doctor who would surpass him, and then pass on that same knowledge to my children and to their children, a chain. “I shall not break the chain,” I said, hoping Ghosh could hear me.

Freud, I knew, wrote that one only became a man the day one's father died.

When Ghosh died, I stopped being a son.

I was a man.

WHEN I LEFT ETHIOPIA two years after Ghosh died, it had nothing to do with Ghosh's deathbed wishes. It wasn't about finding Thomas Stone and healing his pain. It wasn't because the Emperor had been deposed by a creeping military rebellion, or that the armed forces “committee” that took power had been reduced by infighting and murder to one mad dictator, an army sergeant, a man named Mengistu, who'd eventually make Stalin look like an angel.

Rather, I left on Wednesday, January 10, 1979, the day news spread through the city like influenza that four Eritrean guerrillas posing as passengers had commandeered an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 707 and forced it to fly to Khartoum, Sudan. One of the four was Genet. That morning she'd been a medical student, albeit one who had fallen three years behind. By evening, she was a liberation fighter.